User:Waldir

I'm User:Waldir on several Wikimedia projects and I started following explainxkcd.com back when it was a blog, where I commented as "Waldir". Due to my Wikimedia background, I was one of several commenters who insisted in turning the blog into a wiki. The move was eventually made, and was announced on the blog on 31 July 2012. Two days later, I registered my wiki account, and since then I've made 5,980 edits (and counting).

Alternative: only namespacify non-comic pages, that way the main namespace is guaranteed to be only comics (and pages in main are already content pages by default -- not that it would be hard to set others up as content namespaces too, since we'd need to edit the server config file to add new namespaces anyway)

Pros

Special:NewPages gets filterable by namespace, so we could get only new comics (not sure this is really that useful, though: they have all been created and new ones are now put in place as soon as Randall publishes xkcd, so there's not really a need for a feed / notification system)

Special:Random/Comic becomes possible (currently all sorts of pages can be returned. True, most pages are in the comic namespace, but occasionally people will come across a meta page or something.) In fact, we'd have other specialized "Random X" too (random character, random topic...), as well as the all-inclusive Special:Random.

We could embed Special:Allpages/Meta, etc., to get the list of all items in a given namespace, even if they haven't been categorized yet

Cons

?

Rename comic pages to use numbers in parenthesis after the name --> "Comic title (number)", e.g. Michael Phelps (1092)

Having the number at the start of the page name was meant to automatically sort the page in categories, but doesn't really work since the numbers aren't zero-padded. That was kind of a hack anyway. MediaWiki supports category sort keys natively, so we should be taking advantage of them (e.g. by adding SORTKEY to the {{comic}} template) rather than relying on a specific page title format to achieve the same effect.

Pros

Using colons in page names is kind of ambiguous, since that's how namespaces are identified.

This would allow the use of the pipe trick when linking to a comic, since content in parenthesis is automatically stripped out: [[Michael Phelps (1092)|]] results in Michael Phelps

Cons

We can't have auto-complete in the search box by typing just the comic number (and people coming from xkcd will likely use the number for search, not the comic title).

Alternatively, we could use the opposite format: 1092 (Michael Phelps), which would still preserve the pros, arguably even better matching the label people tend to choose when aliasing a comic link (i.e., the comic number, rather than the comic title).

Even nicer would be to merge all comic pages with the image pages, preferably renaming the "File:" namespace to "Comic:". This can probably be done with Extension:SpecialNamespaces, but I need to test to make sure. Not only this would eliminate duplication of pages on the wiki, bit it would also provide extra functionality, e.g. embedding a comic on another page, and allowing category pages to display thumbnails rather than names only.